Let us have peace

by chuckofish

Mount McGregor is a mountain in Saratoga County, New York. It is one of the principal peaks of the Palmertown Range.

“The Palmertown range is the most easterly of the five great mountain-chains which traverse the great wilderness. The Palmertown range begins on Lake Champlain, near Ticonderoga, and running down on both sides of Lake George, crosses the Hudson above Glen’s Falls, and running through the town of Wilton, ends in the high ground of North Broadway, in Saratoga Springs.”

(History of Saratoga County, New York)

The mountain was renamed after Duncan McGregor purchased it for back taxes and built a hotel called the Mountain House in 1876. In 1881 McGregor sold the mountain to the Saratoga, Mount McGregor and Lake George Railroad, owned by Joseph Drexel who constructed a narrow-guage railroad from Saratoga Springs and built the Hotel Balmoral at the summit with accommodation for 300 guests. 

In 1885 Drexel loaned his friend, seriously ill former president Ulysses S. Grant, the use of his personal cottage on the mountain. Here Grant spent the last six weeks of his life struggling valiantly to finish his memoirs before he died. Grant succeeded, put down his pencil and died three days later.

The cottage, preserved exactly as it was at his death, is now the Grant Cottage State Historic Site and is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. We toured the house (after waiting for a DAR chapter to go through) and hiked down to the lookout spot where Grant enjoyed the spectacular view.

It was very cool. You can see Mt. Greylock in Massachusetts!

The hour and a half tour was given by a volunteer docent who really knew his stuff and was obviously an aficionado and admirer of Grant. It was really one of the best tours I have ever had–and I do not as a rule like tours, usually given by amateurs who do not know history or understand context and resort to telling “amusing” stories and making cracks about the olden days. This tour was also devoid of politics and or opinions. It was, however, an hour and a half long and as we were standing the whole time, I was about to die at the end of it.

Luckily, I was able to take a seat in exactly the spot where the Great Man himself sat on the front porch. (Not in the same chair, however, which is inside.)

You know how I love U.S. Grant, so this was a special place to be. Here are a few more pictures of the cottage.

By the way, the floral arrangements from his funeral are still intact 137 years later!

I feel that we are on the eve of a new era, when there is to be great harmony between the Federal and Confederate. I cannot stay to be a living witness to the correctness of this prophesy; but I feel it within me that it is so. The universally kind feeling expressed for me at a time when it was supposed that each day would prove my last, seemed to me the beginning of the answer to “let us have peace.” (Personal Memoirs)

Thanks to the boy who drove the rented Expedition like a fighter pilot to our various destinations and to daughter #1 who took all of these pictures!